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Here's a simple explanation of how it works 👇🏻Think of the Gaia mission as a super-advanced space camera that works a lot like the panorama mode on your smartphone. However, instead of taking a single snapshot and stopping, Gaia continuously scans the sky over and over again for years. By observing the same stars multiple times, it creates a map that is far more detailed than a simple picture, capturing the exact position of billions of stars with incredible precision.To figure out how far away these stars are, Gaia uses a clever technique called "parallax." You can see this effect yourself if you hold your thumb out at arm's length and switch between closing your left and right eyes; your thumb seems to jump side-to-side while the background remains still. Gaia does this on a massive scale using Earth’s orbit. As our planet travels around the Sun, Gaia looks at stars from different angles. By measuring how much a star appears to shift against the background, astronomers can calculate its exact distance from us.Gaia also reveals that the galaxy is alive with movement. Stars don't just sit still; they drift through space, and Gaia tracks even their slightest motions. This turns the map into something more like a movie, allowing scientists to rewind the clock to see where stars came from or fast-forward to see where they are going. At the same time, Gaia measures the brightness and colors of these stars to determine their age, temperature, and what they are made of. By combining all this information, Gaia has constructed the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Milky Way ever built.